A $7,000 Server Comparison

The Power architecture is the big brother of the PowerPC chips used in
the current generation of gaming consoles, many embedded systems and,
until recently, in Macs. The POWER5 processor supports all PowerPC
features and adds a special hypervisor mode. This mode is similar to
the new Intel-VT and AMD-Pacifica visualization technologies and allows
multiple operating systems to run on the same system.

The POWER5 team at IBM has decided to balance single-core performance
with a multicore and multithreading implementation. The result is the
POWER5 Quad-Core Module (QCM) used in the 510Q. It has four processing
cores and the capability of running two independent threads per core.

In addition to balancing the design, IBM invested heavily into
manufacturing technology and automated design tools. This allows IBM to
reach high clock speeds and produce top-performing processors with much
less effort than its competitors.

The Servers

Reviewers often select servers based on the number of CPUs and memory, and then
compare the prices. This works well for an x86-based comparison, but the
servers covered in this article are too different to be compared by CPU count or
number of memory slots. Instead, this article evaluates the servers
based on cost. In other words, what kind of features and performance
can $7,000 buy?

All servers were purchased with standard one-year warranty and no operating
system. The internal disks are used only for the OS installation. The
database and application files are located on an external SCSI disk
array connected via an LSI Ultra-320 controller.

Sun Fire T1000

The Sun Fire T1000 is the smallest of the four CoolThreads servers
currently sold by Sun. It is a 1U unit and comes with a 1GHz T1 processor.
Depending on the configuration, either six or all eight cores are enabled. Eight
slots of registered DDR2 memory support configurations from 2 to 32GB.

Four gigabit Ethernet ports and a remote management card called ALOM
(Advanced Lights Out Manager) are standard. The ALOM is one of the
most easy-to-use and capable remote management methods found on UNIX
servers. One PCI-Express slot is available for expansion.

Like most 1U servers, the T1000 has only a single power supply. A single
3.5" SATA drive comes standard. A cold-swap drive tray for two 2.5"
disks is available as an option. Hot-swap disks are not available.

The server selected for the review was equipped with eight 1GHz cores, 8GB
of RAM and a single 160GB disk. Quoted at $7,322, this configuration was just
barely over the target price for this review.

Because the T1 is a complete SPARC V9 implementation, the T1000 runs
Solaris 10 and virtually all Solaris applications. Sun's Web site also
lists Gentoo 2006.1 and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS as certified.

The T1000 tested in this article is based on an Ubuntu 6.06 installation. The installation
was easy, but required a lot of patience, as the installer obviously
is not designed to run on a 9,600bps terminal. Instead of overwriting the
current screen with the next, the installation wizard first erases the
current screen content, then redraws it completely blank and finally,
in a third pass, draws the next screen. At 9,600bps, this results in a
five-second delay between the screens. Unfortunately, there is no way around
this, because in true UNIX spirit, the T1000 does not have a VGA port.

Solaris on the T1000

Sun provides several documents with tuning information for Solaris
on CoolThreads systems. Linux tuning information, however, is barely
available. To check how much impact the lack of tuning options makes,
all tests were rerun using Solaris 10 11/06 with the recommended
tuning. The bzip2 compression results were virtually the same, although
the other benchmarks gained an average of 10%. Whether this 10% stems from
the better scalability of Solaris 10 or the extensive tuning is hard to say.
However, even with this difference, the T1000 still was far behind the
other solutions in most tests.

HP Integrity rx2660

The rx2660 is HP's newest low-end Integrity server. It is the first HP
Itanium system that shares the chassis with the Proliant line. From the
front, it is difficult to distinguish the rx2660 from the 2U DL380G5 without
looking at the model number or Intel logo. The rx2660 even has the front
VGA port of the DL380—making it the only proprietary system in this
review featuring a VGA output.

Like the T1000, the HP server has eight memory slots for up to 32GB of
registered DDR2 memory. This is, however, where the similarities end. The
rx2660 is a two-socket system and can be equipped with single- or
dual-core processors. The single-core processors run at 1.4GHz and offer
6MB of level-three cache. The dual-core processors can be clocked at 1.4GHz
(12MB cache) or at 1.6GHz (18MB cache).

Two gigabit Ethernet ports are standard, and the system has eight 2.5"
hot-swap SAS drive bays. Depending on which I/O-cage was selected,
either three PCI-X slots or one PCI-X and two PCI-Express slots are available
for expansion. The server can take a second power supply for redundancy
and offers a slot for an optional iLO2 (Integrated Lights-Out 2) remote
management card.

Our test system came with two dual-core 1.4GHz CPUs, 4GB of memory and two
internal 36GB SAS disks. The iLO2 remote management card was included,
bringing the price to $7,095.

The rx2660 is the most versatile unit in this
review. It supports HP-UX
11i, OpenVMS v8.3, Windows 2003 and Linux, without changes to the base
unit or firmware. HP currently supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and
SUSE Enterprise Server 10. Several other Linux variants, such as Gentoo and
Fedora, have Itanium2 versions, but HP currently does not offer support
for those flavors.

This rx2660 discussed in this article is based on RHEL 4 Update 4. After powering on the unit,
the system starts the EFI firmware. The EFI prompt is menu-based and
makes gathering system information and booting the OS very easy. However,
after starting the installation from CD, only two lines about the
kernel being decompressed are printed. Then, the boot process seemingly
stalls. SUSE Enterprise Server showed the same behavior.

An attempt to install HP-UX eventually brought the solution. The system
booted normally until “Console is a serial device, no further output
will appear on this output device” appeared on the screen. Switching
from the VGA port to the serial console worked and allowed RHEL 4 to
install without any further issues.

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